


a soft place to fall

by Anonymous



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 04:26:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9802604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: In her life, Julia does well.





	

When she is thirteen, her father takes the sword and shield down from the mantle, and takes her behind the house to teach her to spar.

 

She listens to the words, but stares down into where her hands grip the handles, worrying her fingers loose and tight. She wonders if it felt the same, in older hands, many years ago.

 

It's not until the instruction is over and she's fighting air into her lungs, worrying fingertips against her young blisters, that she summons enough breath to ask if the war isn't over. Steven looks her with a pang she sometimes shapes her questions to avoid; he shakes his head, and claps her shoulder reassuringly. The pressure is confirmation, as much as his gentle voice correcting her form, that she had done well in the lesson.

 

It was a bad question, she decides, without being told. War or not, she should know the weight of it.

 

\---

 

"If you don't have _gold_ ," the goons sneer, "We'll just take the _chickens._ "

 

"We don't have any," she insists. It's a lie, but somehow she knows to summon the words cool and still enough that they sound unquestionable. A sheen goes over one of their eyes, and she hides her shaking by folding her arms even tighter across her chest.

 

"You have a coop," the other insists. His expression strains, like he's trying to solve a puzzle.

 

"Wolves came," she says, softly enough he has to duck his head to listen. They both hesitate, look to each other, and inexplicably, they turn around and go back into the city. She doesn't move an inch from the porch until they're gone, and the only sound in the yard is the hens clucking softly in their pen.

 

She tells her father about it. Steven puts down his whittling and comes to hold the face of his daughter in his calloused palms, his eyes frightened.

 

"You must be careful. If they know, they'll do something horrible." Then he looks angry, though his voice stays solid and fair. "It's better to let them have what they want. I would rather have a daughter than chickens."

 

"You'll have neither, thinking like that." she insists. "It's the hens one day. They'll bleed this town to dust. They don't care about any of us."

 

"That's exactly why you must be _careful_ ," he insists, gripping her shoulders on the final word. He hugs her, and though he never cries in front of her, she can see his eyes watering as he goes to prepare dinner. So she helps chop the vegetables, listening to her mother's name scattered among Steven's muttered prayers.

 

In the coming weeks, she whispers tales and legends of revolution to her friends over peeled potatoes and games of marbles, but quietly. She _is_ trying to be careful.

 

\---

 

Many years later she meets a young man, vibrant and alive, whose eyes follow her in awe. She thinks _why not,_ but rarely more than that.

 

She does love him, but her mind often wanders as if struggling to hear a song on the wind. Or rather it focuses, somewhere else, a point so distant that nothing here can distract her from it. "Like your mother," Steven would say. It had carried her and her family through her adolescence, through the harsh rule of Governor Callen, and now it carries one more. A fighter with blistering energy and a beautiful smile. The kind of man that needs somewhere to look, to know where he's going.

 

When the time comes to fight, she doesn't flinch away. Not for a moment. "You do what you must," she tells the crowd in the square. Her voice carries, like a song on the wind. "Fight unwavering, with a gentle heart. If we all do as little, no soul need suffer ever again."

 

He rushes in beside her, his eyes and smile as bright as the sun off his axe.

 

_\---_

 

She dies, twenty eight years old, without children.

 

Callen had come in the night, like a wolf stalking hens. She wakes up briefly, falling, then the world comes down like a boot on a fallen bird, and her story ends. The sword and shield had been placed back on the mantle, as it had been before her birth. Maybe that was the price for her blood, for her mother's blood, for the gifts of subtle speech and divination. Finding she can have that thought after the end is what prompts her to recognize her state as afterlife.

 

Her father is here. She can feel his memories, and an ache in her heart-- though she has no heart, or lungs, or bones, or anything, not anymore-- partners the fear she's disappointed him. She can sense now, more than ever, how badly he wanted her to survive.

 

_I'm sorry,_ she sends out. A sentiment of reassurance echoes back, and a memory of a warm hand placed on her shoulder.  


 

Her husband is not here. She is a mix of relieved and guilty.  _Please take care of yourself. I can't carry you anymore. I can't show you where to go._

 

She doesn't want to worry she might find him here, by his own hand. She doesn't want to have to be afraid, on top of everything, after the unfairness of it all. So she holds on to the memory of that smile a moment longer, and the ache it brings, and then she lets it go.

 

She's tired, so tired. More tired than she could ever feel while she was alive, sword and shield in hand.   


 

_You need to rest now,_ comes the thought.  


 

It's almost comical, how late the idea comes to her, and she feels the recollection of laughter when she realizes the strange sense of observation surrounding her is a person she knows. A person she barely knows, by anything more than legend. But they have the same memories, of a cool voice in her chest, of her grip around the hilt of a sword. The same words on her tongue. A baby crying in a warm room.

 

"Did I do well?" She asks aloud. She doesn't know. She needs to know.  


 

The answer is firm, and resounding, and everything she could have hoped for.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't want to dress this up too much, but I had to get something quick-- but late-- out for my favorite for tazladyweek. The thought of a subtly aasimar-blooded Julia has been nagging at me, and her life & personhood has been brewing in my imagination for a while now.
> 
> title from; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_HlPboLRL8


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